“I doubt that, Ameena. I’ve been cautious to keep us directly behind the Devastation. It would seem that the Devastation’s pulse drive generates enough interference to occlude us from their sensors.”
The Devastation was clearly visible now. Connah could see the massive railguns running along the length of the ship’s underside. In the distance, USS Neil Armstrong smouldered amongst the stars as the Devastation continued to pound her with its weapons. Armstrong burned in space, limping towards the invisible wormhole.
“Then what are we going to do?”
“It’s my hope that something will present itself as we get closer.”
“Sure,” She replied, “Maybe a convenient hole in the armour or something like that.”
“Something like that, yes.”
She was silent. For a moment she wondered if he knew she was joking. Then she remembered that Connah didn’t have a sense of humour. Or any other feelings.
“I’m not really sure that I’m ready to die.”
“Can anyone ever say that they’re ready to die?” Connah replied.
They were close enough now that Vorderman’s instruments could register the energy discharges from Devastation’s weapons. She could see Armstrong now also. The ship was visible to the naked eye. A slow moving comet leaving a trail of faint orange embers in the darkness. Small trails of almost invisible white particles streaked from the Armstrong towards the massive warship.
“Armstrong’s still fighting,” She reported, “They’re firing missiles.”
“I see that. It’s a good sign. They aren’t finished yet,” Connah said, matter of factly, “Ameena, we’re approaching our primary target. I’m starting to look for a suitable point of impact.”
The blackened oval blast shield of the Devastation’s blast drive was now all the Lieutenant Ameena Vorderman could see. Connah seemed to be rushing the fighter towards the middle of it. For the first time, she realised that she was going to die.
“I always liked you, Marcus,” She said.
The pusher plate’s major axis was larger than the length of the USS Neil Armstrong. It was all Connah and Vorderman could see now. Connah accelerated the fighter towards the centre of the enormous, elliptical metal construct. When the fighter came within 600 metres, Vorderman’s sensors finally found the target that Marcus had been searching for.
“I knew that,” Connah said, “I’ve known this since the marriage ceremony.”
Marriage ceremony was the nickname fighter pilots gave to the time, during advanced strike fighter training, when pilots and computer information officers would select one another. The pairings generally endured through the career of both pilot and CIO.
“I remember it quite distinctly,” Connah smiled coldly, “I was pleasantly surprised when you approached me. Your performance statistics were in the top five percent. I’d naturally assumed that you were aware of my performance evaluation.”
There was a hole at the centre of the pusher plate. It wasn’t much larger than the Predator. Vorderman realised that this was the channel through which the nuclear bombs travelled. Connah was aiming the Predator for the aperture. It wouldn’t be long now. A few seconds – then…
“I was,” Her voice caught in her throat, “Everyone was, but that wasn’t why I picked you.”
“You chose me in the hope that we would eventually pursue some kind of romantic relationship.”
Two hundred metres. Connah was accelerating. She couldn’t breathe.
“I… I just liked you, Marcus. I just wanted to say that before we…”
“I’ve always liked you too, Ameena,” He interrupted, not wanting her to have to say what was about to happen to them both, “I’m afraid that I’ve never been able to allow thoughts of a romantic nature to affect my judgement.”
The small black hole in the middle of the expanse of blackened dense metal seemed to rush towards the fighter. Ameena wanted to say something else. Wanted to tell Marcus to stop. She wanted to scream. She wanted to do anything. But she was still digesting Connah’s last words when the Predator plunged into the Devastation.
“Heavy damage to main engineering,” Cutter grunted, “Secondary propulsion is hanging in there, Captain.”
“It’s not enough,” O’Rourke gripped the back of Harris’ chair, “Good work, Sylvean.”
“Thank you, sir,” The weapons officer did not avert her gaze from her console for a moment. Armstrong’s nuclear missiles were blasting out towards the Devastation almost faster than the ailing crew could reload them. The powerful atomic devices were smashing into the alien vessel’s devastating railgun sabots, creating a brilliant fireworks display in a tiny region of space. For the past thirty seconds, Harris’s idea had stopped most of the Enrilean railgun spears from hitting the ship.
The USS Neil Armstrong carried 98 ship to ship atomic missiles. They were designed to inflict damage on ships at a distance of up to one hundred thousand miles. The missiles fired now, one every three or four seconds, creating a barrier of energy between the two ships. The Enrilean’s had sent sixteen railguns straight into the massive ball of nuclear energy that Armstrong struggled to maintain. Only two of the sabots had made it through, and those had been disintegrated by the point defence Omni ray before reaching the ship. Armstrong continued towards the wormhole, but it was still vital minutes away from reaching it. Meanwhile, the nuclear missiles continued to fire rhythmically, keeping the space between the two ships aflame with blinding white energy.
“What about the Predator transponder signal? Are we still getting it?”
Ensign Jessica Venus was the luckiest person on the ship. Twenty years old, ordinarily stubbornly impetuous but now subdued and numb. Attractive, in a quirky sense. Eyebrows dark, but plucked too thinly.
She left the engineering section as a gust of air tugged at her non regulation shoulder length hair. She turned to see what it was and caught a momentary glimpse of the massive hole that was pulling everything and everyone out of the engineering section and into space. The emergency door slammed shut, just as she thought of reaching a hand towards Arnau Becker, whose long brown fingers reached out to her. His wide eyed expression of terror was dragged towards the ragged exit into space, like everything else. The young Asian tool keeper tumbled away from her in a deathly expulsion into the cosmos.
She rushed to the command centre, not even thinking all that much about the light coloured chocolate eyes that had pleaded with her for the smallest fraction of a second. Pleaded for what? She didn’t know. What could she have done? Nothing. There hadn’t been time. Now, there wasn’t time to think of Arnau. Not now, not yet. But she did anyway. As she sprinted along the ship’s main corridor, she wondered if he was still alive out there in the darkness. Afraid, agonised and alone. Did he think she was trying to find a way to help him? Was he crazy? What could she do? Goddamn it! He should have stayed close to her like she’d said to him. Sweating engineering teams, desperate medics and miscellaneous faceless crew made room for her as she rushed by.
She reached the command centre umbilical system and there wasn’t room anymore for thinking, fear or anything else. She squeezed through the tight, plastic hole. Someone tried to hold it open for her, but they just got in the way. She swore at the tearful middle aged woman, quietly in her mind.
They were carrying out Commander Craig as she stumbled through the flimsy, flexible plastic conduit. The main corridor to the bridge was sealed off – a four foot chunk of one of the railgun sabots still embedded in the floor. She walked past her mentor – her hero - and looked just once at his burned face.
His eyes were gone. Burned out of their sockets. The skin on each cheek was a very dark red peppered with large black flakes of destroyed, roasted skin. The hair on one side of his head remained, but the rest of his skull was a bright red, agonised beetroot of horror. His mouth was wide open, like he was gasping for breath even in death.
She pushed through the other side and fell onto the floor of the bridge. She
wasn’t meant to be here. Had never trained to be here. Had never imagined to be here – or wanted to be here. Where was Lieutenant Franklin? Or Junior Lieutenant Cassie Somarelli? What the hell had happened to Daniel’s fucking face!
“Who’s manning communications, damn it?” O’Rourke’s voice was strong. No fear, just grim determination.
“Ensign Venus, reporting as ordered.”
She was on auto pilot. It was an incredible feeling. For a moment she was moving through the control centre like someone else was piloting her body. When her back touched the cold plastic of the emergency seat she awoke from the momentary daze. She stared at what was left of the communications column.
“Umm, alright. What am I looking for?”
“About thirty seconds ago there was a transponder signal from one of the Predators,” Cutter informed her, “Steed, Connah, Mackay, Haliburton, Hoover and Lansbury – they're all off the grid.”
“Off the grid means they're dead?” Venus kept her head forward. Her eyes swivelled creepily in their sockets. Looking coldly at the executive officer that she'd never met before today, “We lost the Predators,” she nodded, “Marcus Connah is dead. Seems to match the totally fucked up situation we're in.”
“The transponder?” Cutter's tone threatened.
Armstrong trembled. An immense groan sounded deep beneath the command centre. One of the Enrilean sabots had made it through the nuclear furnace. The molten lump of hard alloy shattered the forward ventral AM engine pod, a thousand wildly spinning gyroscopes exploding outwards like silver fireworks.
“Nothing. No transponder,” Venus shrugged, “No Predator.”
“Keep trying,” Cutter said.
“Sir, where are Lieutenants Franklin and Sommarelli. I haven't trained on this console.”
“Franklin and Sommarelli?” Cutter shook his head rapidly, almost insanely, “They’re both dead. They were blown into space with the whole of engineering and the whole of sections eight, ten and eleven through fourteen. Everyone who was stationed there is dead. Jessica, you do fucking realise that the ship is being fucking pulverised by a massive fucking alien warship? We're getting our asses handed to us, and any minute now we're liable to be blown the fuck up. Now would you just fucking man your station!”
2195AD - SS Glasgow.
“Such beautiful hair. It’s so long and shiny and black. So much like a boy, sometimes. Your father could never see it, but I always did. And I was so sure you were going to be one of those girls who loves another girl. You know what they call them? A bulldagger. A Bull. Something like that.”
“Mom, are you trying to say that... Pop thinks I'm a lesbian? You think I'm gay?”
“Oh no. No, no, no. No, not really.”
“But you just said...”
“I worried that you might be a lesbian.”
All the while, Maria Vazquez's fingers continued to work the avocado and olive oil mixture into her daughter's scalp.
“But you know I'm not, right? Mom, tell me you know I'm not?”
“You're so defensive. Would it be such a bad thing if you liked girls?”
“The mixture stinks, mom. No, it wouldn't be so bad. I guess. But I'm not. And you know that, right? And tell me that pop knows too.”
“He's... pretty sure. It doesn't stink. Its the oil. The avocado smells nice.”
“I think it's the avocado that stinks,” Michelle Vazquez laughed. Oil started to roll down her forehead. She flicked it away with the index finger of her right hand. “You were worried that I might be a lesbian? Isn't that a bit prejudiced, mom?”
“I don't mean worried like that. I just didn't want your life to be any more difficult than it needed to be.”
“I have friends who are lesbians, mom. I wouldn't say their lives were that difficult.”
For the first time, the hands stopped working. The strong digits were now still, swamped in the mess of green fruit and sticky oil. Michelle Vazquez's mother had often been mistaken for her older sister. They looked quite alike, but Michelle had the light skin of her Pert Rican father. Her mother – a native of the New Republic of Dominica – had darker, deliciously milk chocolate skin.
“Which friends?”
“Ally Hiendrich. She lives with her partner, Gillian Anderson.”
“Ally and Gilly?” the hands started working again, “Yes, I can see that.”
“They're very happy together.”
“I can see that.”
The hands were working much harder in Michelle's skull. So hard, in fact, that the squeezing of her mother's bubble gum pink fingertips had almost become painful.
“Now you sound almost disappointed that I... Hey, mom, that's starting to hurt a little.”
“Well, you'd better get out of here then,” her mother smiled a mother's sickly sweet smile.
“Seriously, mom. You're pulling my head off my shoulders...”
She was dreaming. And she was surprised twice all at once. The first surprise was realising that the dream had fooled her. They rarely did. There was no Carmen Milady Vazquez. Well, that wasn't strictly true. There was a box on top of an overcrowded bookshelf in an apartment above a food store in a little town eighteen miles south of San Antonio, Texas. What was left of Carmen Milady Vazquez lay within the cardboard box, along with an “in sympathy” card from the crematorium. The light blue box was covered with five years’ worth of dust.
The second surprise was a little frightening. She wasn't waking up. Not only was she able to manipulate and coerce the content of her dreams; she could wake from them too, at will. This last talent came in particularly useful if the dream started to get out of hand. As her dead mother started to pull her head from her body, Michelle started to scream at herself to wake up.
In the real world, her body slumped to the floor as she lost consciousness. Apple was aware of her plight, but he couldn't do anything to help. He was barely hanging onto consciousness himself. The inertial forces in the ship were pushing him to the left and hard into the harness he'd barely managed to fasten. He couldn't breathe. Couldn't turn his head.
“Sh... Shelly...”
“Punch the override,” The shrill voice belonged to Barrett, who was screaming his lungs out next to Vinn Apple, “The override! The override!”
Apple wanted to look around for Brooks, but he couldn’t move his head. The forces exerted by the repaired Altered Momentum drive system were pushing him further and further away from the console. He still couldn’t get a breath. Somehow, the corners of his mouth were being pulled upwards into a hideous clown’s grin. What override? Where the Hell is Brooks?
Frank Brooks was crumpled in the corner of the SS Glasgow’s command room, pinned against the wall and semiconscious. Apple spotted him as he struggled to keep his head from turning all the way around, breaking his neck. Brooks’ eyes were almost closed, but his index finger was pointing towards something. Then Apple realised what Barrett was screaming about. And he continued to scream – and to cry out – about the override, and about his neck being broken. Apple realised that Frank had tried to reach the shutdown mechanism for the propulsion system. He’d failed. The leap from his seat to the panel in the wall had not gone well. He’d been dragged eight feet away from his intended destination. His body now lay squashed against Michelle Vazquez, who was struggling to open her eyes and look at her long-time lover. She’d tried to reach the panel too, he thought. Or maybe she’d just fallen out of her chair. He couldn’t remember.
He blacked out again, just for a moment. The pain of his twisting neck brought him back to consciousness even when Julian Barrett’s high pitched screaming could not.
“The override,” He grunted.
His right arm was pinned to his hip, the shoulder aching as the forces of inertia tried to pull it from his socket. Five years ago, Apple would have been able to move the arm much more easily. The muscles he’d worked to build had softened since he’d stopped working out. But he was still strong. With a massive force of effort he man
aged to release his harness. The metal buckle flew away to the left, hitting his outstretched left hand hard and opening an inch long wound in the palm of his hand. He expected to find himself hurtling away from the control console, just as Brooks had. But the forces had him pushed back into the seat, which had swivelled so that his stomach was being pushed down into his pelvis.
Then, suddenly, he was free of the seat. The floor rushed at him, slamming into his face hard and chipping two of his front teeth. But he barely had time to register the pain. The wall was coming at him fast, He barely had time to protect his face before he slammed into it hard, the knuckle of his right hand pushing his eyeball into the socket in an agonising flash of sudden pain. “Arghhh! Jesus Christ!” Apple screamed at the top of his voice, “I busted my blasted eyeball!”
The hard, sudden impact against Vinn's left eye pushed the eyeball upwards and into the back of the socket. The excruciating pain was a combination of the eyeball rupturing and the radial bones in the eye socket fracturing. Apple continued to scream in agony as he fumbled for the hatch. The five inch aluminium panel had cut a two inch gash in his forearm. It stang madly, but insignificantly. His tortured eye spilled blood and vitreous fluid through the quivering fingers of his left hand and screamed for attention. Vinn, too, couldn’t seem to stop shouting out in pain. He wrenched the panel off and it flew away, along with two of his fingernails. He managed to stick three of his fingers into the aperture as the invisible, irresistible wrenching forces threatened to pull him away from the hole in the floor. Vazquez was shouting, or screaming. He couldn’t hear what she was saying. Not over the sound of his own wailing.
There were several controls in the panel. The one he wanted was in the middle of the top row. Fortunately, it wasn’t difficult to reach the distinctive, round button. The emergency stop button. And if ever there was an emergency, it was now. He jammed his middle finger down on the button once, twice, three times. Nothing happened. It was only the fourth press that managed to break through thirty years of oxidisation and make the connection.
Beyond the Starport Adventure (Bullet Book 1) Page 46
